Everything you never wanted to know about IBM and IEEE floating point numbers

Kevin W. Hall

ABSTRACT

The CREWES Matlab toolbox SEG-Y I/O functions have long been able to read IBM
floating-point, but have not been able to differentiate between IBM and IEEE trace data.
This was left to the user. In addition, it was not possible to write IBM floating point
SEG-Y files using the CREWES tools. New functions have been written, tested, and are now
available in the toolbox for writing IBM floats. We include new recommendations for handling
both large and small numbers in IEEE format